Alan Sokal weighs in again thanks to Nick Brown who was troubled by the conclusion that The mysteries of love, happiness, fulfilment, success, disappointment, heartache, failure, experience, random luck, environment, culture, gender, genes, and all the other myriad ingredients that make up a human life could be reduced to the figure of 2.9013. It’s quite astonishing…
Here’s a TPM interview with Alan Sokal. As Sokal says, perhaps it is inevitable that whatever his technical achievements are, he will be remembered for the so-called “Sokal hoax.” The vitriol that this debate generated I think did philosophy a service to a degree – “Continental” and analytical philosophy – but the slanging match did…
Just the other day I was conversing with a biochemist friend of mine who works in R&D. We were discussing the entrenched attitude to science that still seems to prevail 12 years on from the so-called “Science Wars” of the mid-90s. On the one hand, there is a schizophrenic attitude emanating from the humanities and the social sciences: 1. that…
manwithoutqualities 